


Of Humans And Other Mythical Creatures

by BitsyDahlia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Emissaries, Fanon, Gen, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Origin Story, Prequel, Werewolf Hunters, Witchcraft, Witches, Work In Progress, but still, just my headcanons, my headcanons my rules, really - Freeform, so basically pure fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 18:14:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4676471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BitsyDahlia/pseuds/BitsyDahlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>America had just seemed like any another gray landscape of misery mixed with wealth, nothing she hadn’t already seen, the only difference being that everything felt like it was maximally amplified: the crowd was the largest she had ever been part of, the building the highest she had even seen.<br/>Claudia felt no particolar feelings of belonging or something similar that could tell her she was in the right place for a long-term stop, just a deep sense of relief since the long sea journey was finally over. </p><p>Claudia just hoped she didn’t stink so bad of puke as most of the other passengers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Humans And Other Mythical Creatures

**Author's Note:**

> Hiii, everyone!
> 
> During the post-season 4 hiatus I started thinking about how it was BH before season 1 and I started to develop fanon regarding the youth of the parents of our teen protagonists.After the episode with the Mama Stilinski's scene, I wanted to share my headcanons and after some encouragement I decided to write them down, trying to fill the holes and answer the questions I have about what happen in Teen Wolf.  
> And PUFF, here it is! Even if it's still a work in progress, but whatever.  
> Hope you'll enjoy it! :)
> 
> I'm kind of new to the whole write-and-publish fanfictions since I'm more of a reader myself and this is my first one complitely written in English (not my native language) so please be patient with me and if you find mistakes or have comments or critics do not esistate and tell me, I'd like to hear what you have to say, please and thank you.
> 
> P.S.: When you find the asterisks in the text, please go to the end notes!

America wasn’t exactly what she had imagined. Even if she had told herself repeatedly before and during her journey not to have any illusions about her destination she couldn’t help expecting something amazing, once arrived in America.There had to be a reason why they called it "American Dream", right?

Yet, after the long days sailing the sea on a ship full of hopeful people like her, the great United States of America had just seemed like any another gray landscape of misery mixed with wealth, nothing she hadn’t already seen, the only difference being that everything felt like it was maximally amplified: the crowd was the largest she had ever been part of, the building the highest she had even seen. Claudia felt no particolar feelings of belonging or something similar that could tell her she was in the right place for a long-term stop, just a deep sense of relief since the long sea journey was finally over.

She just hoped she didn’t stink so bad of puke as most of the other passengers.

Although the first impression was not the one she hoped, Claudia decided to set aside her skepticism and think about the present (and the future) as enthusiastically as possible. Claudia took a look at the surrounding scenary from the pier her boat was docking at, analyzing the harbor and the city trying to make them less alien.

The land where she was born was no more than a cluster of huts of farmers in the middle of a barren steppe that his fellow villagers called countryside in the heart of the cold Poland, the native land of his father and of all his ancestors, or at least the ones her father could remember. Like him, Claudia loved her native land fiercely: the placid life of the village, her paternal grandmother’s cooking, his mother's potions (that were known also in the surrounding villages) and the loving looks her father gave her during the afternoons she used to spend with him in the fields after school, trying to grow something from the poor ground.

Therefore, one would think that a girl from such humble origins had reasonable grounds to remain astonished in front of that glorious city of asphalt, iron and bricks and probably, if fate had held her linked to her homeland until that very moment, she would have widened her eyes and opened her mouth in wonder; but she hadn’t set foot on the Polish land for at least seven years and in the meantime she had traveled and learned enough to know that it wasn’t wise to rely on rumors when it came to visit foreign countries because everything was brighter, magnificent and spectacular in those stories rather than in the reality.

The country where she grew up was different from the one in which her mother had given her birth, it was called Bologna and was really far from being a country town. Italy, the birthplace of her mother, saw her for the first time when she was no more than eleven years old and all she knew about the nation came from her mother, who had worked hard so that Claudia could learn the Italian language alongside with the Polish, "a waste of time!" her husband had called it at the time.

(If someone had asked the girl for an opinion, she would have say without esitation that she preferred the Polish language, simple and straightforward, to the messy Italian one.)

But the man who Claudia had been able to call her father for the first ten years of his life was no longer there to watch them, frowning from the other side of the field. His body was left in his beloved Poland, buried under three meters of ground, horribly torn from the blades of a plow and the hooves of an ox. Even his wife’s ointments and litanies turned out being useless. It was on that sad occasion that for the first time Claudia saw her grandmother Salomeja crying: she had outlived even the last of her four sons. All of them now rested in the local rural cemetery, next to Claudia's younger brothers (twins born four years after her and died the following year) and what was left of grandmother Salomeja’s family. Needless to say, it was a time of grief, sorrow and pain.

Shortly after the man’s funeral, Salomeja, Claudia and her mother decided to leave the countryside that was more desolate and livid than ever in favor of the family of Claudia’s mother.  
  
Bologna had greeted Claudia and two women after a long, tortuous and soporific journey in a sunny and warm day with a lots of bright colors: the train station was packed with people and an incessant noise was ringing in the air, completely foreign and disorienting but at the same time charming to the child.  
Claudia had taken a deep breath, held the hands of her mother and grandmother and together they thrown themselves into the human torrent that flowed between the railroad tracks, in search of their relatives.  
  
Years later, in a different although similar situation (in a sort of way), she had taken a deep breath, secured her hands on the handles of her suitcases and threw herself in the chaotic and hectic American crowd.

                                                                                                                       *

When she arrived in New Jersey, Claudia immediately felt in her bones that that place wasn’t the one she was going to stop in.  
  
During the first weeks after her arrival, being in the American state had been just plain stressful: she used to spend most of her time filling so many different documents – and from where the holy hell that Green Card thing came from?- that those places of the bureaucracy were more familiar to her than the tiny apartment room she affectionately called ‘black hole’ in which she was living (or better, spending the nights) those days. Most of the time she didn’t even understand what she was reading, especially at the beginning, then she decided to invest an awful amount of money in books and people that could help her with the basics.  
Burocracy wasn’t her thing.

She had her high school diploma with her, a certificate of the evening school of English she attended back in Italy and the credentials of several professors that her mother called 'important': even though she had told her family she had no interest in trying and going forward in her school career (finding sympathy and support from the majority of her relatives), they were adamant on bring the documentation along, making an incredibile amount of speeches that had at the center the same 'it’s better to be prepared for the unexpected' concept. At the end Claudia, knowing her family and the capabilities of each member, decided to bring along the paperwork that was being kept gathering dust in a folder for documents inherited from his mather’s father, Giulivo.

She was the first among her relatives to emigrate so far on her own: none of them was there to tell her what was the right to do, which was the best decision to make, no one to follow and no hands to take. Real time communications were rare (at least in the 'conventional’ way, since mobile phones existed but were far from cheap, as well as transoceanic calls) and transcontinental transports weren’t fast enough in case of emergency or need.  
Claudia was ecstatic.  
  
Her mother -wise woman- had guessed Claudia’s intentions years before they were clear to the girl herself and after teaching her daughter everything she knew, knowing that any further attempt would have been vain or even toxic for the girl, she had stopped trying to lead her daughter’s way -with great disapproval from the mother-in-law. Claudia and her mather had the stubbornness in common.

So she travelled between the states of New York, Washington and New Jersey for not less than six months, having as base camp a ratty one-room apartment in the suburbs of New York and eking out a living with poorly payed jobs (and with one of the magic kind that gave her the real money) and saving as much as possible. At the end of her sixth month she had a driving license in her pocket and a car (a second hand one, but still a car) in the parking lot of the condo she was living in. The car was a payment she received instead of actual money from ‘Aunty’ Saturnia, an old and friendly witch with a nasty goblin problem that Claudia solved using a series of potions and rituals that took her almost a month to complete.  
After she clared the situation with her landowner, she had to wait untill she had all the burocratic papers so she could leave that place that never felt like home and she instinctively decided to get away from the East Coast and travel to the Central America. After she had placed all her (few) belongings in her car and stored it with food, water and various maps, Claudia started her run through America.

There, wandering among these states, she had the opportunity to live an increadible amount of different experience that broadened her skills, she met people never in her short life would have believed the existence and the meeting and she met a lot of human (and not so human) beings: some of them had become her mentors, a lot of them were now her friends, a few of them turned out to be her enemies but they were all united by the fact that their names and their stories were written down on Claudia’s ’Book of Memories’, a notebook her mother had given her on her sixteen birthday as part of a family rite of passage.  
  
During certain parts of the crossing she also had some fellow travelers and some of them were actually simple hitchhikers gathered on roadsides.

However, Claudia had no trouble admitting that it wasn’t always all roses and cotton candy. At the beginning it wasn’t easy, the bubble of peace provieded by her family that had always protected her was no longer surrounding her. She had trouble adjusting to the rhythms of the New World, learning to live with the foreign language and a different society 24/7 and dealing with all its novelty and strangeness; she had also stumbled several times across criminals, thieves or sinister characters that had tried to get far more than just money from her, like that couple of times when people from two extremist supernatural community of New York City and Cheyenne had tried to steal her powers or that time in which she was almost kidnapped by an hunter’s family while she was in Chicago. Fortunately, her mother had warned her and gave her weapons (both of the supernatural and human kind) to defend herself so she escaped all those situations almost unharmed.  
  
All considering, her ride through the deserts and mountains of Central America had proceeded without to many hitches and the more the journey continued, the more her car gained weight with objects and memories, the more she felt free and her magic grew stronger.  
  
                                                                                                                       *  
  
Almost a year after her arrival in America, Claudia had crossed the country, bought - and destroyed – two cars (they were both old and battered when she had bought them, she did her best, okay?), and the only people in the family she was still keeping in touch regularly with were her mother and her father’s mother. Claudia’s maternal grandmother, Persephone, had died shortly after the eighteenth birthday of her granddaugther, a few months before Claudia’s departure.  
It was late winter when she crossed the border between the state of Oregon and California.  
  
The girl had immediately felt it, the familiar tingling sensation and freshness she felt spreading all over her body when she had a premonition: her journey was coming to an end, she was about to find the place (at least she had found the state, that was something) in which she was going to stop, maybe forever.

From the border between the two states she had continued along the coast until she arrived at San Francisco, where she planned to spend the early spring months. She fell in loved with the city as soon as she set foot there, despite Betti (her third car) exhaled her last breath as soon as they had passed the San Francisco road sign, just in front of a gas station, but Claudia decided to be optimistic and preferred to interpret the event as a sign of her future stay in San Francisco – so she promptly proceeded to find a worthy replacement of Betti.  
  
During the morning she found an accommodation in a small but clean motel, with an indoor parking and an English garden in the middle of it: the owners were a middle-aged couple with no children and with five cats who had immediately taken Claudia into sympathy. (Yes, the cats took a liking to her while the owners watched her with the usual distrust which at that time was quite common when someone was looking at girl who was driving a junk car and was traveling alone.  
Once registered at the reception and received the keys so she could go to her room, Claudia repeated what during her travel had become a routine: checking the interior space of the room, unloading her bags, making sure she has properly closed the car, putting her luggage in order of content and usefulness (something that was becoming increasingly difficult as she kept accumulating souvenirs), undressing, taking a quick shower, getting dressed even more quickly and getting out to discover the city.

It was only when she came back to the motel that night, lying on the bed with a full stomach and sore feet, that she wondered what she would do in this city. Or rather, what she wanted to do.  
Along side with her supernatural job that was much more paid than the ‘mundane’ ones, she needed a cover job to prevent the non magical society from discovering the magical one - not that she would go and do anything to blow their secret -she was a liable girl, thank you very much- but you know, better safe than sorry. The facade chores she could usually find -waitress, cleaning lady, dishwasher -had helped her survive but never really satisfied her ( at least not as mush as those that Claudia occasionally performed for and on supernatural creatures did) and she realized that it was time to start building something solid for (both) her future.  
  
She liked the nomadic life and if she was another girl she probably would continue to travel but her instinct told her to slow down: in that year of travel her magic had grow up so much, been able to run freely to explore and get in touch with the nature of unknown places, fed with the knowledge acquired by druids, shamans, healers, seers, and everyone Claudia had met along the way and had been generous enough to welcome and teach her something new. All those experiences made her foundamental knowledge even stronger and broader.

She didn’t need the basics since both Claudia’s grandomothers and mother had taken care of her magical education since she was old enought to understand the difference between reality and fiction and the importance of discretion: she remembered fondly the tedium she felt when both Salomeja and Persephone had repeated the basics of their essence to her so many times that she learned them by heart, with words that had sounded abstract and difficult at the time but became increasely clearer the more she got older.  
But she also remembered the joy she felt when her mother left the young girl browse throughout her books and journals full of figures, images and symbols that Claudia couldn’t wait to learn and the excitement she felt whenever the mother took her along to visit magical beings and creatures she knew and helped.  
It was then, lying on the bed of a motel in San Francisco, that the feeling of a premonition run across her body in the stronger way she had ever experienced and for the first time it showed her two blurred imagines: a place crowded with what looked like students and curly dark hair.

When Claudia came back to reality, she didn’t take too much to make her calculations: her first vision could only be the confirmation that her place had to be close and it was time to put in place her potential taking her place in a supernatural community, but it also suggested that before doing so, she had to take another couple of steps (and stops) along the way so she could get ready.  
  
                                                                                                                  *

The feeling of peace that the moment of revelation had brought faded and soon became euphoria.  
  
She waited until midnight to make room on the floor of his room, pulled out of the brown worn leather suitcase, previous property of Persephone, which contained her library, various tools of different materials including the silver tray indispensable for the spell that Claudia had in mind, and took the herbs box, the one with the vials and the one with the stones and had started work, hoping for a lucky break and for the help of the Moon for the success of the spell.

The communication spell worked with four basic conditions: first, the ingredients had to be the right ones; second, the ingredients had to be dosed correctly; third, the person who you were intended to contact also had the (right) potion on their tray; fourth, said person should be close enough to the tray that they can answer the call. Usually it was because of this last assumption that the communication didn’t take place.  
The fourth point was the reason why communications between her Italian relatives and Claudia were so limited and infrequent: travelling often by car, Claudia had no way to be available for unexpected calls from overseas, not to mention the fact that trying to hold a tray with water balanced in a running car was not practicable and even if it was, it would be a big distraction factor for the driver, who could see it suddenly light up and emit sounds in the most random and disparate occasions (she tried it once or twice with almost tragic results).

So Claudia and her mother took a routine whereby, lunar calendar in hand, at 3 p.m. (Italian time zone) on the first day of the waxing and waning moon of each month the mother would have formulated the spell while her daughter would have kept the tray ready on the corresponding American hour, depending on where the girl was at the moment.  
Grandmother Salomeja often joined the conversation and in those occurrences their speeches became a mix of Polish (Salomeja had never been able to learn the Italian language, fortunately the daughter-in-law had no problem with Polish) and lots of laughter.  
The tray was unnecessary for her since she lived with her daughter-on-law and she could do without it, so Salomeja had bequeathed her tray to Claudia that, being a young apprentice, needed one to start her training.  
The fact that Claudia was the only –probable- representative of the new generation of emissaries of her father's family had greatly influenced Salomeja’s will and after a long discussion made of hand gestures and Latin with Persephone (occurred when Claudia was just a little girl), the Polish woman had the approval by the Italian matriarch and consequently the approval of the entire clan. (All these treats may seem excessive especially among members of the same family, but the delivery of ritual objects from generation to generation was a big deal, not to be taken lightly in the magical community, especially the lineage of witches and druid.)

That night, however, was neither the first night of the waxing or waning moon, so the girl didn’t have the certainty that the call would be successful; nevertheless, the excitement and happiness were too overwhelming not to try and share them with her mother and anyone who was in the family house in that moment.  
  
Claudia chopped a bunch of herbs and filtered a green juice from them, adding the juice to the water along with one hair, a few stones and a few other ingredients - magicians never reveals their secrets!-, then Claudia recited the spell that knew by heart and saw the greenish water becoming opaque and transforming into a mirror-like surfaces and waited, beginning to run a hand through her hair nervously once the first minute past, call unanswered.

Less then five minutes (spent staring at the ceiling in the living room of his mother's house -the tray must have been resting on the coffee table, Claudia thought) later, she heard the sound of a door opening and slamming coming from the tray and frantic voices getting closer and closer, while the noise of shoes and paws approached the living room and the view of the ceiling became increasingly shaky.  
  
"Claudia," said the voice of his mother, Andromeda, before she even entered the visual of the daughter. When the image of a woman with short dark hair occupied almost the whole tray, Claudia smiled back to her mother. Adonis and Ondina, a pair of old shepherd dogs belonged to his maternal grandparents, leaned on the tray, sniffing warily at first, then trying to lick it.  
While the dogs disappeared from her view, not without a couple of unhappy barks from being evicted, and before she could speak a single word, Claudia heard the voices of her two aunts and shortly after she saw their faces, barely visible to the girl since they were covered by their own hair because of the position of the tray, as they leaned out alongside Andromeda.  
  
"Honey, what happened? Why did you call? Are you okay, right? Nothing to worry about, I hope!" exclaimed nervously Leonina, the last question barely audible because covered by the words of the other aunt.

"Leonina, let the girl breath! Girl, you’ve gave us grey hair with this sudden call! We were out shopping and your mother stopped frozen in front of the frozen food aisle – which it was kind of funny to be honest, she had milky pale face and her eyes almost came out of her sku- uhmp " Claudia had no time to worry about her mother’s health that Andromeda interrupted her sister Isadora with what the girl interpreted from the movement that the width of the tray allowed to perceive and the barely audible groan of pain, as a dig in the ribs.  
  
Andromeda made space for herself between her sisters by moving their hair to be able to talk face to face with her daughter.  
  
"Don’t listen to these old witches, you know that they like to be melodramatic," Leonina pouted and Isadora snorted hearing the appellative, " I’m fine. I had a premonition, we dropped everything and we ran home, but I knew there was a good reason for your call, a happy one! "Exclaimed the woman, trying to shut with a wave of her hand her sisters that were trying to intervene in the conversation.

"Favete linguis!"* ordered a deep voice, the owner outside the space of the tray so that Claudia couldn’t see her but could easily recognise her. The warning made the three women turn on their right and had the power to silence Claudia’s aunts and made her mother grin.  
  
"Dziękuję Babcia," ** Claudia said with a smirk.  
  
"Proszę, kochanie" ** replied Salomeja while still being out of the sight of the tray and then muttered something that sounded a lot like 'feminae garrulae' * addressing the aunts. For a few seconds Claudia faced the ceiling of the living room again and from the series of shadows messily moving on the ceiling and the soft background noises that came Claudia was able to hear, she realized that the elderly woman was moving Leonina and Isadora from the sofa to the armchairs on the side of it so she could sit on the couch next to Andromeda. When Salomeja and her daughter-in-law were placed side by side, the youngest took the tray in her hands and placed it gingerly on the legs of the older, placing it to fairly divide the space of visibility available.  
  
"Salomeja has bound your aunts to the armchairs," she informed her daughter smiling, "where were we?"  
  
"Powiadom nas, kochanie" **, said the old woman, her voice softened.

Claudia told them everything, alternating Italian to Polish for the benefit of her no-Polish-speaking aunts, from the arrival in San Francisco's to the recent revelation and her intentions for the future.  
  
The four women listened carefully to the monologue of the girl, her aunts moving from the armchairs and ranking behind the couch silently and her mother and grandmother nodding and smiling encouragingly, their expressions even more joyous even if Salomeja’s one hadn’t really changed a lot from the beginning of the conversation, but Claudia knew her grandmother wasn’t a very expressive and extroverted person so she appreciated it anyway.  
  
When she finished her story -her mouth dry and the clock marked almost one a.m. -, silence fell on both sides of the tray and Claudia imagined that the women needed a few minutes to digest it all. She was proved wrong when the four women react in unison although in different ways not even a minute after: Leonina burst into tears, a litany of 'my lil’niece grew up so fast' came out of her in between sobs, Isadora cried for joy and began to dance across the room, Andromeda literally howled raising her arms in the air, almost tipping over the tray in the heat of the moment while Salomeja smiled a bittersweet smile that creased her cheeks and forehead and a single tear crossed her face.  
  
Even Adonis and Caliope seemed to understand the importance of the news and had begun to howl following the example of Andromeda.

"Oh my Goddesses, you have found your Eden. My love, that’s wonderful! " her mother congratulated first ," I’m so happy for you, you have no idea. I wish I could hug you, " she concluded, touching her chest while the expression of sincere joy stayed on her face despite the unreleased tears in her eyes.  
  
Claudia could only guess that behind her mother, aunt Leonina had let herself slide on the back of the couch, the sound of her muffles sobbing the only indication of her presence in the living room, while aunt Isadora had circumnavigated the living room (the girl had followed her aunt’s dancing shadow projected on the walls and ceiling by the light coming from the nearby window ) and returned to take place behind the couch next to Leonina, starting to pet her with one hand in a poor attempt to comfort her.  
  
Her niece’s announcement reopened a wound in Leonina that had never healed: his youngest son, Domitillo, had found his Eden just a few years ago while on vacation in southern Italy, in a town near Syracuse, and decided to stay there and never came back (not even once), while her eldest daughter, Varestina, who had no powers, got married and moved out to live two cities away from the mother. Despite the love Leonina felt for both her children, the fact that he who would have been her successor was gone elsewhere (even if he didn’t do it on purpose) and instead his daughter no powers had remained very close to her had marked her, meaning she had no one to inherit her place as witch in her homeland.  
  
Isadora, however, had only one son, Napoleon, an apprentice wizard who seemed more than happy to remain in his native country and had no intention "to move his ass from home" (his words), so he was probably going to be the handler of the family business in their native town.

It was a big deal, especially for old fashioned families like Claudia’s one, to have at least an heir to succed the previous generation and sometimes it became a real life competition to win the title (Claudia had saw half a dozen of those disputes and found them quite hilarious). Luckily for her, the times had changed and people started to think about the whole ‘fight to be the one-and-only magician where you were born’ thing in a more relaxed and open minded way. On the other hand, Claudia was in one of those delicate and rare position in which someone found themselves with both wizarding (her mother) and druid (her father) heritage and didn’t have a clue about which part of the family power they took after. From what she could see right now, she was quite sure she had taken after her Italian roots, but history had tought her that ‘mixed’ people like her were full of surprises.

"Jestem szczęśliwy dla ciebie, dziewczyna" said Salomeja with serious expression, "Jestem smutny, bo jesteś daleko, ale cieszę się, że znalazłeś swoje miejsce, choc daleko ode mnie." **  
  
The elderly had formulated in words what was the common thought of the women: even if the news was one of the happiest you could hope in the life of a magical being like them, because during their lifes a lot of them weren’t able to find a place (precisely called Eden) with which they felt a sense of belonging even stronger than the homeland so often a sorcerer established themselves in a place of sheer convenience or they just decided to avoid the whole ‘find your Eden’ thing by just staying in the same place their family have always been, the thought that Claudia’s earthly paradise was on the other side of the world was amazing and depressing at the same time. Until then, Claudia’s journey had been encouraged by her family as it was considered training for the girl, but the fact that during her adventure she had actually found her Eden had taken everyone by surprise.The aunts, in fact, would have bet on Poland (since the total and unconditional love of Claudia for that nation), while Andromeda and Salomeja hoped for Italy and no one would have imagined a place so far from the girl’s roots.  
  
It was indeed unusual for a witch to settle down so far away from the family; of course over the generations and in many families had happened that some younger member had taken off to distant lands, but if in the wizarding community there were famous stories of witches whom had crossed the oceans, there were few known cases of magicians that had found their Eden on the other side of the world.

Essentially it meant that Claudia would have been particularly linked to the city (wherever it might be, given that it had to be close despite the fact that Claudia hadn’t found it yet) and even more in case that in the said city there was a wizarding community in which she was able to take her place as witch or whatever she turned out being (in fact it was actually common that human beings with magical abilities such as Claudia and her relatives were able to randomly find their 'paradise' by being attracted to places where there was the presence of supernatural beings in need of their presence). Then, probably, the girl would never return in the Italian peninsula except for short periods of time, thanks to tricks like the Andirispecchio; despite the considerable consolation given by the possibilities of visual and verbal communication through objects such as the Andirispecchio and the LanxLoquens (the silver tray, for instance), nothing could take away the sense of loss that gripped the hearts of four women at a time when they realized what was the double side of the coin, the price that Claudia had to pay (locked away from her original family for the chance to build a new one and find the place where she was truly meant to be), and the one they had to pay (forcedly and definitively giving up her presence as a key part of their lives -a granddaughter, a niece and a daughter- and also a possible heir of their witch heritage in exchange for the happiness of the girl).  
  
"Wiem, ¿że to nie będzie łatwe. Ale to jest moja ulica, jestem pewien. Dla mnie ważne jest Twoje zdanie. Dziękuję Babcia. "** Said the girl to the elderly. Claudia understood the implications of her grandmother’s words and so did the other women, having been able to follow the conversation thanks to Andromeda’s whispered translations; after a moment of great emotion, the four had recovered (even Leonina had stopped crying) and had begun to spill ideas, reminiscences and information through which they hoped to help the girl in search of her Eden. While in her family home in Italy the women were working like bees in their hive, the girl on the other side of LanxLoquens was overwhelmed by the energy of her family and contributed to the discussion only with a few nods of the head and some small comment, stunned by the almost tactile sense of reality that the revelation was increasingly taking.

The exchange of ideas was interrupted when the women realized that time had passed, thanks to Napoleon who had showed up and grumbled because his mother hadn’t cooked dinner yet (and Claudia had never liked her cousin as much asin that moment, because even if she was grateful for the support, she was dead tired).  
  
Andromeda, Salomeja, Isadora and Leonina took their leave from the girl lavishing kisses and warm farewell, with the promise of good news on the occasion of their next conversation.  
  
When Claudia got up from the floor, her legs were numb from staying in the same position for hours and to prevent painful encounters with the floor she threw herself on the bed, then proceeded to stretch her back, her bones cracked profusely and her neck ached like hell. Claudia thought out loud while turning over in bed: as soon as she found a permanent accommodation (because with her current lifestyle there was no way that something so delicate and expensive as the Andirispecchio could survive more than a couple of weeks), she was going to buy a nice, big Andirispecchio to hang on a wall, so she could finally say goodbye to stiff neck and conversations held in uncomfortable positions.

As she continued her mumbled speech against the use of LanxLoquens and was indignantly grumbling about the incidence of skeletal disease in a good percentage of the old school witches, she drifted off to the deepest sleep she had ever slept since the beginning of her journey.

**Author's Note:**

> * Latin speaking (sort of, I'm still rusty since it's been a while)  
> -Shut up!  
> Chatty women
> 
> ** Polish speaking (I don't actually speak Polish but I did some research and I tried to be as accurate as possible, hoping I'm not offending someone with my trying!)  
> \- Thanks, grandma.  
> \- You're welcome, dear. (literally, sweat heart)  
> \- Tell us, dear.  
> \- I'm happy for you, child. I'm sad because you are far away, but I'm glad that you found your place, though far away from me.  
> \- I know that it won't be easy. But this is my way, I'm sure. To me, your opinion is important. Thank you, Grandma.
> 
> If someone speaks or writes or understand Polish, any suggest and/or correction is welcome. :)


End file.
